Lindsay’s Aid To Timing

by Ed Carlson, CMT

George Lindsay made some significant contributions to technical analysis, yet we often don’t hear about him or his work. Here’s a look at his methods and how they can be applied in today’s markets.

Although unfamiliar today, analyst George Lindsay was well known in his time (1950s to 1970s). He never wrote a book about his unusual and unique market timing methods, so the books I wrote about Lindsay and his techniques are the result of cobbling together information from his old newsletters, all of which are at least 40, 50, and even 60 years old. Someone once referred to my work about him as my “journey with Lindsay.” It’s true! It has been a learning experience finding and reading his newsletters in order to understand what he was doing that enabled him to forecast market highs and lows months in advance and often to the very day. I am indebted to those who shared those newsletters with me.

During the writing of my first book, George Lindsay And The Art Of Technical Analysis, I often found Lindsay making references to his 1950 paper, “An Aid To Timing.” It wasn’t until after my book was published that chartist Sam Hale sent me a folder of old Lindsay newsletters he had kept for decades. There in that folder was the missing paper.

FIGURE 1: STANDARD TIME SPANS. An advance of 900 days would never occur, as none of the standard time spans contains that duration — too long for a long basic advance and too short for an extended basic advance.

In Lindsay’s seminal paper, published in 1950, he laid out the framework. The basic cycles are used to determine from which lows in the market the basic movements are counted. In my latest book, An Aid To Timing: The Annotated Edition, I have reproduced the entire paper in order to preserve it for history. I have added annotations to the text in order to better explain what Lindsay was doing.

…Continued in the April issue of Technical Analysis of Stocks & Commodities

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